A Clockwork Orange Returns To UK Cinemas/ Art On The Screen

A hooligan is forced is forced to watch images of digital art featuring
big-eyed girls and faux surrealism in a bid to cure him.

Kubrick's classic, A Clockwork Orange, is back in UK cinemas from 5 April. I saw it as a 13-yr-old at my local cinema in 1972. No, they weren't too bothered about your age as long as you had the money to buy a ticket. We loved it, naturally, especially the early fight scene between the gangs. Alex's droogs, complete with braces and boots, so obviously represented a futuristic version of our skinhead tribe, to us, just as the other gang were clearly greasers.

Decades later I came to appreciate the film as a masterpiece rather than just a thrill for teenage boys. 

 

Here's the new trailer...

I can relate to this idea of 'real world' colour made more real on a screen. Aside from post-scan alterations of my art, there's something mysterious, often magical that happens to it once seen on a screen. Perhaps it's akin to the difference between seeing something, say wildlife, with your own eyes and seeing it on film. The obvious difference, especially for someone like me, whose eyesight is not improving, is the quality a great camera brings to the images.

It is not the 'quality' of transference that can improve a scanned paper print, since it always needs tweaking to match the original, in my situation, but the very fact that it's on a screen. Is this the modern equivalent of another age when artists might thrill at seeing their work beautifully reproduced in a book? Picture quality aside, the obvious benefit is that all images can be shared and shown once in the computer. 

Alex was prescient in his comment, considering the world's addiction to the screen. Our insatiable desire to film and photograph everything on phones suggests that only then are the experiences, never mind the colours, made 'really real'.

Satellite Dish, RTomens, 2019